Although I'm not actually gay --- I can't remember having had so much as a dick in my mouth --- I'd certainly have an uphill battle proving that if I were being indicted for gayness. And if I were attracted exclusively to men, I'd definitely have sex with men instead of living celibate. Finally, a lot of people close to me are gay, bi, or transsexual. Nevertheless, I think the current calls to boycott Chick-Fil-A because of the anti-gay views of its president are anti-liberal and authoritarian.
The liberal ideal of freedom of speech goes beyond a norm constraining government actions; it's a norm about how public debate ought to be carried out: with everyone free to speak their mind without fear of suffering a backlash, and nobody intimidated into silence. The liberal ideal is that ideas stand or fall on their own merits, not on the personal connections of their proponents. That's why we don't want the government telling us what we can and can't say — there's no guarantee that the ideas that the government endorses are true rather than false. If you let the government suppress speech because of the viewpoint it expresses, you end up suppressing the truth in many cases. Lynch mobs and picket lines, if used to respond merely to speech, can suppress speech just as effectively as police action. In this case, Chick-Fil-A is not discriminating against gay people, except insofar as following the broadly established social and legal norms surrounding employment benefits for spouses and the like constitutes discriminating against gay people. An effective boycott, or police action, against a company for actually discriminating against gay people would be entirely justifiable. But what we have in this case is something quite different: Chick-Fil-A, or at least its president, is *advocating* discriminating against gay people. That's speech, and ought to be respected and not punished, even if we find its contents odious. What we're seeing here is simply the left-wing authoritarian equivalent of the right-wing calls to boycott Oreo over their rainbow cookie a few weeks ago. My sympathy for the ends to which this boycott campaign is directed does not justify its means of intimidating people into silence. If campaigns like this succeed, people must choose between expressing unpopular political viewpoints and making a living. Society is healthier when people feel free to air every viewpoint, not just the viewpoints you like. Guaranteed commercial ruin for anyone who advocates anarchism, or atheism, or polygamy, or legalization of recreational drugs, or pacifism, or whatever viewpoint the majority finds odious, would make society much less free, as surely as government censorship would. The more likely case, to me, is that these calls to boycott are ineffective and merely a distraction, because effective commercial boycotts are currently few and far between. But my claim is that this kind of boycott, a boycott to punish odious speech, is not merely ineffective; if it were effective, it would be poisonous to society. -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-tol
